Tivo CEO: “TV is getting more like music”

Tivo’s CEO Tom Rogers, addressing the UBS Global Media event in New York, said television was going through some fundamental changes, which was why Tivo had introduced its ‘Roamio’ device. Rogers described the new devices introduction as “spectacular” with one reviewer writing that it was the ‘Holy Grail of set-top boxes’.

“Roamio is really the only answer out there in terms of taking traditional television channels, the recorded and live world, the world of over the top content putting it altogether in a single box, with a single remote with a single interface and giving you the multi-screen capability to enjoy what you recorded both in your home and now out of the home, obviously, the name Roamio is a play both, on the back that it’s for TV lovers but it allows you to roam anywhere and we have done very strong reviews on the ability to give you that multi-screen where ever you wanted the experience,” said Rogers.

[“There are] many people who still think TiVo is a DVR and have a hard time understanding the evolution of TiVo, and the Roamio product has been a key wave for us to begin to educate the marketplace in terms of just how far advance we have gotten from the core foundation of DVR technology is that it is really a combination in many ways of your Apple TV, your Google TV, your Roku, your Slingbox, your cable box, your DVR all put together in a single easy to use approach that gets you a combination of things that just aren’t available for many one of those individual products.”

Rogers added: “I think television is going to get more and more like music and by that I mean that the offering available for the consumer will look more and more like music even though I think the business structures of the television world will continue to hold up much better than they did in the music world. The music world was crushed by the onslaught of a digital technology, all the basic elements of the music business broke down yet what is emerged for the consumers is a fantastic experience. You can get just about any piece of content you want, you can get an a la carte, you can get it aggregated, you can put it in bundles that are personalized, you can get it to any device that follows you from the cloud with complete connectivity wherever you are.”